Legal Theory

THE FUNAMBULIST PAMPHLETS VOLUME 04 LEGAL THEORY Edited by Léopold Lambert August 2013 THE FUNAMBULIST PAMPHLETS VOLUME 04 LEGAL THEORY Edited by Léopold Lambert August 2013 THE FUNAMBULIST PAMPHLETS VOLUME 04: LEGAL THEORY © Léopold Lambert, 2013. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ This work is Open Access, which means that you are free to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work as long as you clearly attribute the work to the authors, that you do not use this work for commer- cial gain in any form whatsoever, and that you in no way alter, transform, or build upon the work outside of its normal use in academic scholarship without ex- press permission of the author and the publisher of this volume. For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. First published in 2013 by The Funambulist + CTM Documents Initiative an imprint of punctum books Brooklyn, New York http://punctumbooks.com ISBN-13: 978-0615868905 ISBN-10: 0615868908 Cover by the author (2013) Acknowedgements to Eileen Joy, Anna Kłosowska, Ed Keller, Lucy Finchett-Maddock, Costas Douzi- nas, Gilbert Leung, David Garcia, Santiago Ciru- geda & Chaska Katz INDEX 7 | Introduction: The Law Turned Into Walls 9 | 01/ Architecture and the Law: An Epistolary Exchange With Dr. Lucy Finchett-Maddock 23 | 02/ Remus Has to Die 26 | 03/ Trapped in the Border’s Thickness 28 | 04/ Absurdity and Greatness of the Law: The Siege of the Ec- uadorian Embassy in London 32 | 05/ The Space Beyond the Walls: Defensive “A-legal” Sanc- tuaries 36 | 06/ The Reasons for Disobeying a Law 40 | 07/ Political Geography of the Gaza Strip: A Territory of Experi- ments for the State of Israel 45 | 08/ Palestine: What Does the International Legislation Say 51 | 09/ In Praise of the Essence of the American Second Amend- ment: The Importance of Self-Contradiction in a System 54 | 10/ Power, Violence, Law by Costas Douzinas 64 | 11/ Fortress London: Missiles on Your Roof 68 | 12/ Short Digression About the Future of Drones (After Seeing One at JFK) 70 | 13/ Quadrillage: Urban Plague Quarantine & Retro-Medieval Boston 78 | 14/ Historical Map of Quarantine 84 | 15/ Collision, Sexuality and Resistance 86 | 16/ The Spatial Issues at Stake in Occupy Wall Street: Consid- ering the Privately Owned Public Spaces 90 | 17/ Strategies for Subversive Urban Occupation by Recetas Urbanas 97 | 18/ Is Housing a Human Right? Considering the “Take Back the Land” Manifesto 100| 19/ Center for Urban Pedagogy The Funambulist Pamphlets: Legal Theory / 5 6 / The Funambulist Pamphlets: Legal Theory INTRO THE LAW TURNED INTO WALLS Legal theory came into my field of research through the ex- cellent platform Critical Legal Thinking and three of its regular writers/editor: Lucy Finchett Madock, Andreas Philippopou- los-Mihalopoulos and Gilbert Leung. Their work articulates legal theory, politics, literature and philosophy in a way that has been highly influential for my attempt to accomplish some- thing similar in relation to architecture. The relationship between architecture and the law is similar to the one between the egg and the chicken: it would be dif- ficult and probably useless to determine which one created the other. The interesting question, however, is whether one can exists without the other. The law requires architecture to crystalize the territory where it applies — the example of private property is the most obvious, — and architecture, in its inherent power to control the bodies, cannot help but create new laws for each diagrammatic line it materializes into walls. The following texts also attempt to understand what it means to disobey or “go around” a law because of ethical incompat- ibility with its prescriptions, as well as question when it can be legitimate to do so. Such disobedience cannot be accom- plished lightly or selfishly, and therefore requires solid reflec- tive bases in order to be a catalyst of political and/or design strategy. In that matter, the present volume does not pretend to bring solutions, but rather proposes a few thoughts and examples. The Funambulist Pamphlets: Legal Theory / 7 8 / The Funambulist Pamphlets: Legal Theory 01 ARCHITECTURE AND THE LAW: AN EPISTOLARY EXCHANGE WITH DR. LUCY FINCHETT-MADDOCK New York, July 12, 2012 Dear Lucy, I have read your essay, “Archiving Burroughs: Interzone, Law, Self-Medication” with attention and appreciated, as usual, the way you manage to link fiction, law and space together. I do think however that we should keep this text for a little bit further in our conversation since its specificity might make us miss the bases of the discussion that we would like to have about architecture and the law. I would like to ingenuously start by stating some obvious facts. The law, understood as a human artifact, constitutes an ensemble of regulations that have been explicitly stated in order to categorize behaviors in two categories: legal and illegal. In order to do so, the law expects a full knowledge of its content from every individual subjected to its application in order to moralize and to hold accountable attitudes that are either re- spectful or transgressive. The law is undeniably related to space, as it requires a given territory with precise borders to be implemented. Nothing is The Funambulist Pamphlets: Legal Theory / 9 easier to understand than the space where one is allowed to smoke or not. Law also includes within this territory smaller zones of exclusion, from the corners of the classroom to the penitentiary, where another form of law — supposedly a more restrictive one — is applied. These spaces are reserved for individuals who, through an active refusal to obey specific parts of the law, are to be separated from the rest of society. Individuals, when captured by law enforcement forces, are brought into these zones of exclusion and are being held in them for a given period of time provisioned a priori by law itself. Many other spaces constitute territories where law is also dif- ferent, but composed of layers of laws that do not contradict each other. Spaces like schools, offices, factories, hospitals apply a legal superimposition in order to complement the ter- ritorial law with sets of rules specifically formulated to opti- mize their institutional function. Space itself is not necessarily an artifact, although the des- ignation of borders that delimit it certainly constitutes a human intervention. This act of delimiting is probably the first legal gestur. Let us consider architecture as the ensemble of human physical modifications of the environment, whether it is agricultural, urban or infrastructural. It would probably be useless to wonder whether law invented architecture or whether it is precisely the opposite. What we can affirm, however, is that architecture, through its physicality, embodies the immaterial law. This is clear in the case of the zones of exclusion was evoked above. The fundamental element of the law of exception applied in them consists in prohibiting their subjects from exiting their space. In order to implement such a prohibition, an impermeable architecture needed to be created: this is the invention of prison as an architectural program. 10 / The Funambulist Pamphlets: Legal Theory Prisons are the extreme examples of how architecture embodies the law. We are nevertheless surrounded by more do- mestic cases of architectural enforcement of the law. During a curfew or quarantine, your own house, supposedly so neu- tral and innocent, can become your own prison. But was this house so innocent to start with? Isn’t the house the material embodiment of a law that integrates private property as one of its components? How can we enforce property in a bet- ter way than to build impermeable walls on the lines that the law abstractly constructed? By using the universal “laws” of physics, — nobody can cross a wall without tools for example — architecture renders explicit the law which otherwise would need to be discursively enunciated otherwise in order to be acknowledged by its subjects. This vision is, however, centered on architecture and I am wondering how the legal theorist like you interprets this relationship. Do you think that there can be a law with no architecture and/or a lawless architecture? If architecture is really the embodiment of the law, can we think of an architecture of illegality? I very much look forward to reading your response to these questions, as well as other problems you might propose in this conversation. Cordially yours, Léopold The Funambulist Pamphlets: Legal Theory / 11 Exeter, UK, August 17, 2012 Dear Léopold, Thank you for your letter dated 12th August, I apologise for my tardy reply but I have been away, as you know, in India. India, of course being a great example for the themes of architecture and law of which you speak, whereby not only are there plural legal levels of law as a result of the genealogies of colonialism, but so too there are those very clear architec- tures of law that reveal legal dichotomies, the insides and the outsides, those included and excluded (and of wrath of the common law in particular). Nowhere else has there been such a use of law as a mechanism of legitimated disposses- sion than in colonial India, with the decentralised despotism of the Raj and their opulent palaces as reminders of their decentralised British power; the acceptance of customary law into a plural legal hierarchy of state law that put the common law as the pinnacle of all might. When thinking of the role of land and law, and the wall as the boundary, the legal space in which all of the divisions and structures of hierarchy are analogised (or not even analogised, but actualised), there is a reason why one is so struck by architecture as the architect of law — or law as the architect of architecture.

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